Optical Network Control: Architecture, Protocols, and Standards

14.5. Deployment Issues

The recent turmoil in the telecommunication industry has clearly altered the scope and the time frame of deployment of the optical control plane. In the early part of 2000, some predictions called for widespread deployment of intelligent optical networks containing hundreds or thousands or nodes, each with thousands of ports. This type of deployment, however, has not occurred so far. In fact, recent deployments of intelligent optical networks have consisted of smaller networks with perhaps tens of nodes. At the same time, some of the more sophisticated new applications that had been expected to be widely deployed are slowly entering the trial and testing phase. Several important issues listed below need to be resolved ...